


scar tissue and frayed nerves

by Eleanor_jane (eleanor_jane)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-30 00:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12642792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleanor_jane/pseuds/Eleanor_jane
Summary: Bobby was starting to think she had a type.





	scar tissue and frayed nerves

Bobby was starting to think that she had a type. That wasn’t a good thing, because her type left her winding up here. Sat in a quinjet, spinning her nunchucks and avoiding Coulson’s eyes. Everything is stickily similar to how it was, and she can’t shake that same feeling of something being very wrong. The faces are different and Coulson’s face is more lined, but the main difference is that back then she was angry and now she’s just sad.

Clint Barton had been daring and dangerous and exciting and impossible and annoying and closed off and reliable. He’d wandered into her life and stolen her heart: the typical whirlwind romance. Sure, she was put together and he was a mess but they fit for a while. Some days he would turn up and take her to the beach and they’d eat a strange picnic: tangy pies and rock cakes that burnt your tongue and sandwiches that tasted like sawdust.

Other days he would be bleeding and sweating out a fever from some classified mission. Those days she hated him in a hidden, shadowy part of her because it made her feel so. She wanted him to let her in, and they were getting better, she was sure of it.

Then they weren’t in love anymore. 

He got kidnapped and she searched for him with a team and Natasha Romanoff by her side. When he came back his barriers were up. All Clint Barton had room for in his beat up mind was Strike Team Delta. Their breakup tasted sour and she cried for a bit and then she moved on.

Lance Hunter had come later. Yes, he’d been daring and dangerous and exciting and impossible and definitely annoying, but Barton had been closed off and Hunter was ripped open and bleeding and raw. Scar tissue verses frayed nerves.

Hunter had appeared one day in a bar and they’d drank too much and made a mistake that turned out to not be such a mistake. He made her weird British pancakes and made her late for work. When she came home he was still there, and said he didn’t have a place to go. They argued and threw hits and received them. Once she made him cry. 

Hunter made her toad in the hole and cottage pies and angel delight. He only turned up at her apartment when he’d been in some fight, but then she turned up with a twisted ankle and a mean fever at his flat in London so it was fair. They tore each other to pieces and their divorce was a mess. She sobbed and promised not to love him again, promised herself she was better than that. 

She fell in love with him - pathetic, yeah, but unavoidable - just by existing close to him, caught in his orbit. Then she fell for him all over again so utterly that when he tied a piece of grass around her finger she thought they could last forever.

Then Lance disappeared and they didn’t track him down for a week or so. Six days and five hours. This time May was there instead of Romanoff but Coulson was sitting in the same damn place.  
“You’re aware of the plan?” Coulson asked, and she had nodded. She’d lived and breathed the plan, she’d thought through every single possibility apart from one. That she’d get there and find a dead body. Everything was ready and this was the only place Hunter could possibly be and she was going to get him back.

She did get him back, eventually. Punched and scratched and torn to pieces, swearing and screaming through the night. Alive, but gone. In a week they’d driven him away and but someone else there, so she went to a seminar on PTSD and walked through the night.

Then she removed everything that could be broken and squeezed Hunter’s hand, and gave him tea instead of beer. Coulson’s shoulders slumped when she told him they needed a break, they needed British beaches and a chance to fix themselves. They swore and threw things and slept in different beds, and she threatened to leave at least three times. He cooked her something so burnt it was unrecognisable and Bobby visited his nan. It wasn’t like before. This time, she wasn’t going to walk away.


End file.
